Wednesday 23 April 2014

No Bad Design in the Human Eye, Expert Says

Image courtesy of Wikipedia (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).




Joel Kontinen

Richard Dawkins has used the inverted retina argument in an attempt to say that an intelligent creator could not have designed the human eye.

Poor design is a favourite argument but it is nevertheless a bad argument.

Recently, Creation Ministries International released a YouTube video clip that looks at it and finds it wanting:

This claim doesn't make sense, after all, octopus retinas are wired in the supposedly correct way but their sight is poor compared to ours.

Ophthalmologist Dr Peter Gurney has shown there are good reasons our eyes are wired the way they are. In particular, it allows our photoreceptors to be in close contact with two special tissues necessary for regenerating the photoreceptors and absorbing excess heat. But these tissues are both opaque, so if our retinas were wired the other way you'd be trying to look through two opaque surfaces, which means you'd see nothing
.”

The video also points out that eagles “have the same wiring as us and they are renowned for their eagle eyes.”